One of our developers, Patrick Carnahan , has put together a customized build process template that parallelizes a build by platform/configuration. That is, if you use it to build multiple platforms (e.g. “x86” and “x64”) and/or configurations (e.g. ...

I often hear people asking if Windows Workflow replaces MSBuild in TFS 2010, so I wanted to take a moment to comment on this question.

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When you create a View for an ASP.NET MVC web application, you add an .ASPX or .ASCX file that uses the ASP.NET engine to render a combination of mark-up and code. Unfortunately, those Views don’t get compiled until IIS renders them for your web site...

Aaron Hallberg had previously blogged about Preserving Output Directory Structures in Orcas Team Build . The approach he described allows you to work around the problem of having all of your build outputs dumped into a single directory. Unfortunately...

In TFS 2010, the Build Service is a Windows Service that is associated with a particular TFS Team Project Collection . Each Build Service support zero to one (0..1) Build Controllers and zero to n (0..n) Build Agents. Each Build Agent is associated to...

If you’re developing (or planning to develop) on the Team Foundation API and you want to get the server assemblies installed on your machine in addition to the client assemblies that are included with Visual Studio, just follow these simple steps: Launch...

This How to article walks you through the process of creating, packaging, deploying and applying a custom check-in policy for TFS. Check-in policies let you run rules, whenever someone attempts to check-in a set of changes, to ensure that the changes...

In this post, I’m going to walk you through a TFS SDK sample that extends Team Projects and Team Explorer in TFS 2010. This solution is implemented as a Visual Studio Industry Partner (VSIP) package and includes a Project Creation Wizard plug-in and a...

Updated for TFS 2010 RTM! One of the common requests we hear is to provide a way of automatically updating the version information in the assemblies produced by a TFS build. Unfortunately, it’s one of those features that never gets quite high...

While it’s very convenient to have SQL 2008 Express installed along with Visual Studio 2010, it’s unfortunate that it’s missing the Express version of SQL Management Studio . There is, however, a pretty straightforward (if not particularly discoverable...

I really like having Windows Search integrated into the Start Menu in Windows. It’s a handy way to find documents, programs and even control panel links. I found it really strange, however, that I couldn’t find classes and methods in my source code. After...

I've fielded a few questions about what type of machine (hardware, operating system, etc.) works best as a TFS 2010 build machine. The answers probably won't surprise you, but they may serve as helpful reminders as you plan your deployment. Operating...

If you have a Visual Studio 2008 solution with one or more Compact Framework (also referred to as “Smart Device”) projects that you’re trying to build with TFS 2010 or MSBuild 4.0, you’ve probably hit one of the following errors: error MSB4062: The "Microsoft...

If you’re a TFS 2008 user who’s thinking about installing TFS 2010 Beta 2 , you may be wondering what will be involved in getting your existing build definitions to work in 2010. You see, build definitions in TFS 2008 are entirely automated using MSBuild...

If you’ve checked out the latest Visual Studio SDK, you may have noticed something relative to the previous releases: SDK Release Download (MB) Visual Studio 2005 124 Visual Studio 2008 109 Visual Studio 2010 10 So, where’d the other hundred megabytes...

One of the really nice new features in TFS Build 2010 is support for symbol and source server. While the names “Symbol Server” and “Source Server” are somewhat misleading (there isn’t really a separate server involved), the...

I’ve been working on a web site for a local non-profit as an opportunity to spend more time with VSTS and TFS as a user. I setup TFS 2008 SP1 in a virtual machine running on my home PC and made it accessible from the public Internet. I created the web...

I often hear that our customers hit challenges when developing ASP.net applications with VSTS and TFS. I’d like to kick off a dialog with a goal of identifying the key pain points so that we can deliver guidance to eliminate, or at least mitigate that...

There are a number of things you can do to improve build performance in TFS 2008: Reduce the scope of the Get as much as possible by fine-tuning the workspace mapping. Reduce the verbosity of the MSBulid logger (defaults to “diagnostic” in .NET 3.5) by...

This is the first in a series of planned blog posts on new features coming in Team Foundation Build 2010. Team Foundation Build 2010 includes a new feature that lets you reject check-ins if the associated changes cannot be successfully (and automatically...

As far as VS 2005 or VS 2008 are concerned, “Classic ASP” applications are just text files. You can edit them and you can check them in and out of version control. When people ask about managing “Classic ASP” applications with VSTS/TFS, they’re usually...

This post is now obsolete For more information, please see Team Foundation Server Migration and Integration Solutions . The TFS product team has been working with Hewlett Packard’s (HP) Quality Center team to develop the TFS 2008 –...

I was just reading Brad Butt's Suggestions for Microsoft, Part 1 and I thought I'd take the opportunity to let him know that we are addressing two of his three frustrations in Team Build 2010. Brad's Frustration #1: MSTest cannot stand alone from the...

We’ve been talking with the BizTalk Server team about supporting MSBuild (and, transitively, Team Build) in their next release but I thought I’d share a really terrific post I recently came across about building BizTalk Server projects with the current...

There are a number of projects that you can create and build in Visual Studio that are not supported by MSBuild. That means you can’t use MSBuild to build them from a command line and you can’t build them if they’re contained in a solution you’re building...